San Francisco, California -- In a speech at today's commencement ceremony at UCLA, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking spoke of the beginning of time, the Big Bang, and the origin of evolution.

"It was almost like, boom, and all this stuff was there, pretty much," Hawking began, slipping into a surprisingly flawless John Madden impersonation as the audience slid into a coma, "but that doesn't explain the origin of evolution, though. How did that begin? When did organisms first begin changing to higher beings? And for that matter when did the organisms even change to organisms, and so on. The answer to all these questions might just lie in something more complex and believable than simply 'survival of the fittest.'"

Over the next 45 minutes, Hawking related how he'd spent the last 3 years in Antarctica with a group of six scientists and a maid (for personal reasons), studying penguins and their natural environment, and how he knew he was on to something when he made an unexpected and a potentially inflammatory discovery.

"It was just a toffee wrapper with small beak marks in it, crunched into the snow, and as I looked closer, it was very clearly laced with some DNA" he recalled, "I took it as evidence and headed back to base camp where we had a homemade DNA testing kit, and the results almost made me fall out of my chair. The DNA was undoubtedly, and as I had suspected when I saw it, that of an Emperor Penguin. It was then that I knew I was on to something."

Digging deeper in the snow and the mystery, Hawking and his colleagues discovered an abandoned toffee factory, with machinery that could not possibly be operated by anything that didn't have beaks, wasn't four feet tall, had anything but otherwise completely useless wings, and wasn't black and white with small yellow markings on its face and neck. Carbon dating put the construction of the factory at 10,000 BC, or at least as he would like us to believe.

"We'd found an advanced civilization in place in Antarctica 6,000 years before the written word," Hawking said, "we had to keep digging." In the course of the next three years, he developed a full fledged theory as to how man has actually evolved into the two handed, bipedal, weak collarboned ceature that he is, and how penguins de-evolved into their current short, squat, stupid looking form.

Also, we found some claw marks with paw marks when we started digging, indicating a penguin-cat fight, possibly for turf or sport. When we dug deeper, the claw marks somehow began growing in size, suggesting fights with bigger and bigger animals as we went along. The last found footprint fighting with a claw mark was that of a T-rex."

Insert a paragraph here: You seem to have forgotten to include the part where penguins invent evolution. Or did you end up dropping that idea?

Hawking concluded his lecture by saying he's named this phenomenon the "Happy Feet Exception," and said that he is currently trying to persuade his colleagues to adopt it too. According to this theory, the penguins have been and will be the connecting thread to and from all the animals/birds/hobbits who have ever come out of this Earth. "Caterpillars, monkeys, koala bears, komodo dragons, normal wannabe dragons, Jay Leno, Homer Simpson," he said, "any living thing you can think of has originated from penguins. Well, except of course Batman who I previously declared has come from algae in another research project of mine a couple of months ago."